case that we re waiting for today, hallie. pete williams, we ll come back to you the second we hear any word from the court. thank you. the probably noticed we re not in our usual perch where pete is in washington. that s because we re perched above the stage today where round 2 will go down today in about ten hours or so you ll sew joe biden, kamala harris, bernie sanders, pete buttigieg. they got a sneak peek at the format after last night where the candidates jockeyed over the biggest issues economy, health care, immigration, you name it. getting a chance to show voters how they would take on president trump. i want to return government to the people. on january 20th, 2021, weed say adios to president trump. i don t think we should conduct he foreign policy in our bathrobe at 5:00 in the morning. donald trump is simply wrong.
but chief justice roberts agreed that the secretary s stated reason, namely enforcing the voting rights act, was a pretext. he says the evidence does not support that and we should therefore send it back to the w is. it s significant that the chief said you have to come up with a real reason, not a fake reason. and we re not going to completely defer to the president on this issue. it would have been as dramatic as the citizens united case if the supreme court by a 5-4 vote republicans against democrats had allowed this question to be presented. the fact that it s not shows chief justice roberts as the institutionalist concerned with the nonpartisan legitimatesy of the court willing to join liberals and conservatives on other issues and holding the balance of power and trying to prevent the court from becoming just as poll hear raisarized in polarized age. the supreme court has sthaent citizenship case back to the lower court in what appears to
of the business of having any role of putting limits through the constitution on part an jerry mandering. correct me if i m wrong here, rick, so in essence the question is when it s too much, the court is saying that s not up to us to decide. that s essential correct. the court has said we re not prepared to saul all partisan jerry mandering is all constitutional. that would be a clear rule. instead the court has said the question is how much is too much? on that question, the court says we haven t been persuaded there s a principled clear, judicial rule for draws that line. obviously four justices dissent and don t agree that the courts cannot come up with clear rules here, but this is a very momentous decision, lower courts have been striking down partisan jerry majerrgerrymanderers, and
not letting the structure of our democratic institutions be corrupted by self-serving politicians from either party who are looking to protect themselves from competition, looking to manipulate politics for partisan and incumbent-protecting reasons. as you see in that dissent, there s a deep cry of kind of the injury to the democratic system here that the court is unwilling to take on through constitutional doctrine. pete. let me ask you this. what kind of a bar would a future case have to clear in order for the supreme court to take up the issue of partisan jerengineer eppsry mand gerrymandering. here they re saying we don t think any test exists. i think any litigation like this is at least a decade away.
emerged in oral argument that i m sure rick recalls, is that the court was wary of saying yes, okay, we re going to entertain partisan gerrymand gerrymandering claims for feel they would have hundred from around the country, because face it, partisan gerrymandering is a part of life, but they were concerned there s no way to know when to blow the whistle. s melissa, just to explain to folks, back in 2010 ropes in particular made a very big push to win over state legislatures in the states, in part, for this reason, to redistrict ways that ended up being favorable. obviously this is something that democrats do, too, as the maryland case highlights, where doctor it go next, as it relates